September 23, 2005








  • Hurricane Rita: Locations at risk


    Hurricane Rita is expected to hit the Texas coast late on Friday or early Saturday local time. The BBC News website looks at the locations most vulnerable to the heavy rains, high winds and storm surges the hurricane is expected to bring.



    HURRICANE PATH




    Hurricane Rita was initially headed for Texas's biggest city, Houston, and the town of Galveston. The storm has veered slightly eastwards towards Beaumont and Port Arthur, but it remains unclear where it will hit land.

    Mandatory evacuation orders are in place for a swathe of land south of Houston, including Galveston. Texas emergency officials warn that the entire city of Port Arthur could be flooded by a 6-7m (18-22ft) storm surge.


    HOUSTON




    Mobile-home dwellers and residents of low-lying areas have been urged to leave. A mass exodus from Houston, a city of two million, has caused vast traffic jams on routes inland.

    Houston is a flat city built on clay just 12m (40ft) above sea level. Several flood-prone marshy channels drain into the Houston Ship Channel. Officials fear a storm surge could sweep across Galveston Bay and up the channel, flooding parts of the city.


    GALVESTON




    Situated on a barrier island, Galveston is vulnerable to storms and was hit disastrously in 1900 by a Category Four hurricane which left 8,000 dead.

    When the town was rebuilt, sand from the bay was used to build the island up to a higher level and a 5.2m (17ft) sea wall was constructed. But with forecasters warning that storm surge flooding could push water levels up to 6m (20ft) higher than normal, there are fears the town will be inundated. Galveston is only about 6m (20ft) above sea level.

    At least 90% of the town's 57,000 residents are thought to have fled.


    NEW ORLEANS


    New Orleans graphic


    New Orleans suffered widespread damage and 80% of the city was flooded when Hurricane Katrina hit on 29 August. Much of the city lies below sea level and the system of canals and levees designed to keep water out was quickly overwhelmed.

    Makeshift repairs have been carried out, but with rainfall from the outer edge of Hurricane Rita adding to the pressure on the system, water has begun pouring over the top of the patched-up levee on the Industrial Canal.


    REFINERIES




    Texas processes a quarter of US oil and at least 16 of the state's 26 refineries are potentially in the hurricane's path, stretching along the Gulf of Mexico coastline.

    Many were shut down as the hurricane approached. Two communities which may be hit hard by the storm are Beaumont and Port Arthur, home to petrochemical and oil industrial plants respectively.

  • Everybody leads with the mass evacuation


    Traffic, Stop
    By Eric Umansky
    Posted Friday, Sept. 23, 2005, at 12:54 AM PT


    Everybody leads with the mass evacuation—and epic traffic jams—in the face of now-Category 4 Rita, which has continued to jog east a bit. A guesstimated 2.5 million have evacuated or are trying to—though only about 1.5 million have been ordered to do so. If Rita stays on its current track, Houston will likely be spared the worst of it and New Orleans' levees will be seriously tested.


    One Los Angeles Times reporter writes—at length—about how it took her 14 hours to travel 70 miles. That was far better progress than some residents reported. As of the last update that TP saw (3 a.m. ET), CNN was still reporting gridlock.


    There was plenty of confusion and panic about the traffic. Texas' governor ordered southbound lanes on several highways reversed and opened to evacuees. But the Washington Post flags Houston's mayor complaining about the fact that the move didn't happen until the afternoon. The New York Times that says on at least some of the highways a contraflow was ordered and then dropped. There was talk of sending in fuel trucks to help stranded drivers, but it's not clear if they've shown up.

    The NYT puts local officials through the ringer, suggesting the jam was partly brought on by the mayor's dire and—the Times suggests—indiscriminate warnings. By late yesterday afternoon, the mayor was being more circumspect: "If you're not in the evacuation zone, follow the news." (TP wonders how fair the Times is being. Could the mayor really have been expected to anticipate and correct for the Katrina effect?)


    Houston's two airports were also tough going. A couple hundred federal security screeners didn't show up for work, creating what USA Today says were some five-hour waits at checkpoints. The feds said they're sending in replacements. But the airports are scheduled to shut by midday.


    With Rita's move to the east, it's now expected to hit near the border with Louisiana. Gov. Blanco said anybody in western Louisiana who plans on sticking around should "write their Social Security numbers on their arms with indelible ink," so their bodies can be ID'd later.


    It's already raining a bit in New Orleans, which is under a tropical-storm watch. The NYT says some of the levees have already sprung small leaks. One neighborhood—the Lower Ninth Ward —already has about six inches of new water. "The levee's going to cave in," said an engineer on the scene. "In the middle of the night, this thing is going to be gone." But that might not be as bad as it sounds: The neighborhood is already lost, and a flood there could serve as a sort of safety valve for the rest of the city.


    USAT describes Rita scarily but unhelpfully as "the size of Michigan." (How big are other storms?) More solidly, the NYT emphasizes that Rita could end up dumping far more rain than Katrina did. That's because forecasters expect that once it makes landfall, it will stall for a few days. A final bit of bad news about Rita's eastward drift: An even higher concentration of oil rigs and refineries is now in its strike zone. A bit more than 90 percent of oil production in the Gulf has been shuttered.


    The last time two Category 4's hit the U.S. was in 1915. One was in Galveston and the other: New Orleans.


    The Houston Chronicle has set up two blogs worth watching: one by staffers and the other by "citizen journalists," AKA bloggers.


    A front-page Post piece looks at the achingly slow pace of trailer-home construction for those displaced by Katrina. Only about a 1,000 families have been moved into such homes so far. About 200,000 families need housing. But the WP buries some crucial context. As the paper mentions way down, there is bipartisan support for skipping the trailers to the extent possible and instead focusing on giving people vouchers to rent their own apartments. The Senate has already passed such a bill. But it's being held up in the House, because the WP says (in the 25th paragraph): "GOP sources say they are waiting for a response from the Bush administration."

    The Wall Street Journal says Katrina caused 10 major oil spills, dumping nearly as much crude and other petrochemicals as the Exxon Valdez did. But it's obviously spread over a much larger area, and the surrounding marshland tends to make a quick comeback. The larger problem, explains the Journal, is that the marshlands are disappearing.


    USAT and LAT tease, the Post fronts, and the NYT—weirdly—off-leads the Senate Judiciary Committee voting—big surprise!—to send Judge John Roberts to the Senate. The final score was 13-5, with three Democrats joining all 10 Republicans to vote aye. The Senate will vote in full next week. The suspense will be minimal.


    The NYT goes inside with the Senate rejecting a White House-supported bill that sought, as the Times puts it, "to get food to starving people more rapidly and efficiently." The bill would have allowed U.S. aid agencies to buy food locally rather than, as is currently required, to ship it all in, which adds about 50 percent to costs.


    The Journal and NYT report that the SEC has opened an investigation into Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist's sale of his holdings in his family company just before the stock took a dive. The money was held in a "blind trust," meaning actually Frist could sell it but couldn't know how much he had. It's worth knowing, as the WSJ points out, "the SEC routinely investigates stock sales ahead of major news, such as an earnings warning or a merger."


    Opportunity Missed … Yesterday's TP flagged a brief mention in the Post that so-called opportunity zones haven't happened to create many opportunities. The WP in chimes again today, with an editorial:



    The idea of spurring business activity in needy areas with tax incentives has been tried by both state and federal governments many times before, but economists who've looked at the record find no evidence that such schemes work. ... Moreover, Mr. Bush isn't just dusting off a failed policy tool. He's proposing a particularly bad version of it. Unlike many enterprise zones, the GO Zone offers tax breaks for investment but not for job creation.


    Why again have news pages not looked into opportunity zones?


    Eric Umansky (www.ericumansky.com) writes "Today's Papers" for Slate. He can be reached at todayspapers@slate.com.

  • Storm Raises Fears on Weak New Orleans Levees




    Ethan Miller/Getty Images
    Checking the depth of the London Avenue Canal in New Orleans.


    September 23, 2005

    Storm Raises Fears on Weak New Orleans Levees


    By JERE LONGMAN and MICHAEL BRICK


    NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 22 - As the outer bands of Hurricane Rita raked past with gusty winds and showers, water began seeping into the shattered and empty Lower Ninth Ward through makeshift dike repairs on Thursday, and the Army Corps of Engineers expressed concern about just how reliably a weakened levee system could protect this devastated city against a tidal surge along Lake Pontchartrain.


    Little more than 24 days after Hurricane Katrina killed at least 832 people in Louisiana, Hurricane Rita was expected to scour New Orleans with winds that could reach tropical force as it headed toward landfall near the Louisiana-Texas border.


    At the least, two to four inches of floodwater are expected here in a city that sits largely below sea level, Mayor C. Ray Nagin said on Thursday, adding that he had been reassured by the corps that the city's mended levee system could withstand an expected storm surge of three to five feet.


    "If it's any higher than that, then you can have water pushed into the city," Mayor Nagin said at a news conference. "Then the pumping capacity becomes really challenged."


    Five thousand troops from the National Guard and the 82nd Airborne Division are preparing to secure New Orleans against another storm, and Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco has called for an additional 30,000 soldiers. Mayor Nagin said he was watching weather reports with a kind of paranoia now that Hurricane Rita had made a turn that could take it farther east than previously expected.


    City employees, once upbeat about the rebuilding process in a city that still lacks drinking water and has only limited electricity, have grown anxious about the prospect of being hit by even the periphery of a second powerful storm, the mayor said.


    "People are struggling with the fact, 'Why such powerful storms back to back?' " Mayor Nagin said. "We're talking to people and trying to get them to focus on the task at hand. Maybe we'll be spared this time."


    In the Lower Ninth Ward, where two gaping breaches in the Industrial Canal levee submerged and splintered one of the poorest sections of the city, four to eight inches of water began seeping back into some abandoned and destroyed neighborhoods by noon on Thursday. Small waterfalls of leakage could be seen several feet below the top of the repaired levee as wind pushed rising water from Lake Pontchartrain through the Industrial Canal.


    This was to be expected, said Chad Rachel, a civil engineer with the corps, after an inspection of the repaired breaches. There did not appear to be any erosion of the compacted clay base of the patched dike, he said, adding that he felt certain the large, interlocking stones atop the base would be able to withstand the expected storm surge.


    "We don't expect any problem with a catastrophic breach," Mr. Rachel said.


    By dusk, however, water had continued to rise, and Maj. Barry Guidry of the Army offered a direr assessment after examining the leaking at the Industrial Canal. "The levee's going to cave in," Major Guidry said. "In the middle of the night, this thing is going to be gone."


    Even if heavy flooding did happen again in the Lower Ninth Ward, this might serve as a kind of safety valve that could prevent water from submerging more inhabitable parts of the city, police officials said.


    "This is a graveyard already," said Sgt. Bryan Lampard of the New Orleans police, who was in the Lower Ninth Ward searching for bodies or the rare possibility of a survivor. "This area is not coming back anytime soon."


    Houses were shoved off their foundations and splintered in this ruined section of the city. Cars were turned upside-down. The damage resembled that on the Mississippi Coast more than it did many other parts of New Orleans. About the only thing salvageable from most of these houses was a hammer, said Eric Baum, a spokesman for a federal search-and-rescue team from Miami.


    Rescuers left the area as the water continued to seep in but said they had nearly completed their search for bodies. Only about 20 were recovered in the Lower Ninth Ward, said Capt. Tim Bayard, who is in charge of the recovery effort for the New Orleans police. This suggested, Mayor Nagin said, that the death toll from Hurricane Katrina, once predicted to be in the thousands, now seemed to be "much lower than anyone imagined, which I'm thankful for."


    At the breached 17th Street Canal, which flooded the Lakeview section of New Orleans, a crew from the Army Corps of Engineers finished shoring up sandbags and metal pilings that jutted above the side of the levee like rusty dominoes. The levee was no longer leaking, but a direct hit by even a greatly diminished Hurricane Rita, or storm surges of more than 10 or 12 feet from Lake Pontchartrain could wash out the makeshift plugs, said Robert Foret, a quality assurance officer with the corps.


    "We have saturated levees right now, so this is all guesswork," Mr. Foret said.


    The plugging of breaches in the 17th Street Canal and London Avenue Canal to protect against a storm surge has required a tradeoff, Mayor Nagin said. Water might be kept from coming into the city, he said, but it will be more difficult to force out from the midtown area because the improvised repairs have left three of the city's most powerful pumps unavailable, he said.


    "Everybody's on pins and needles right now," Mr. Foret said.


    Ten buses were available near the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center to take residents out of the nearly empty east bank of New Orleans, but only one or two people decided to evacuate what is essentially a ghost town on Wednesday, Mayor Nagin said.


    He cautioned that Hurricane Rita was a dangerous storm, and although New Orleans did not figure to bear the brunt of the hurricane, the city could not let its guard down.


    If the storm made a significant turn eastward, Mayor Nagin said, "we have a whole other ballgame."



    Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

  • Leading a Rooftop Rescue by the Dawn's Early Light




    September 23, 2005

    Leading a Rooftop Rescue by the Dawn's Early Light


    TIMOTHY WILLIAMS


    BATON ROUGE, La.


    After 18 years of military service on active duty and in the Louisiana Air National Guard, Staff Sgt. Michael Sorjonen thought the mission sounded routine: rescue a handful of people from the roof of a two-story Holiday Inn.


    But as the Black Hawk helicopter approached the flooded hotel in the New Orleans East area on Sept. 2, he was stunned by what he saw on its balcony.


    "For a minute, we sort of looked at each other and didn't say anything," Sergeant Sorjonen said. "It was something - something you wouldn't expect to see here. Something you wouldn't want to see here."


    Hundreds of people were crowded onto the balcony, with barely an inch to spare. Some were weeping, some waving hotel towels. Others were on the verge of passing out from the heat and days of privation.


    Even having his helicopter fired upon in Iraq paled in comparison, Sergeant Sorjonen said.


    Three days earlier, Sergeant Sorjonen, 37; his wife; and their cat and two dogs fled their home in Slidell, La., a small city across Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans, as Hurricane Katrina approached. He had no idea what condition his house was in, or whether it was even there anymore.


    Now, in the half-light of dawn, he had to guess whether his helicopter would fit on the roof and whether the crew would be greeted as rescuers - or as authorities who had responded with too little, too late.


    "We were concerned we might get overrun," he said. "So I told the pilot, 'If you see me running back toward you, get ready to go, and I'll dive in. We'll come back.' "


    That was not necessary. By the time the four-member crew had finished the rescue - 10 hours and 25 or 30 trips later - they had ferried about 420 people to safety. They included people in wheelchairs, several amputees and at least eight pets.


    As for his house, Sergeant Sorjonen said he flew over it a few days later. His neighbor's 50-foot pine had fallen on the roof. "It hit his house first, so that slowed it down," he said, smiling.


    TIMOTHY WILLIAMS





  • Bus Carrying Elderly Storm Evacuees Explodes Near Dallas




    Jeff Mitchell/Reuters
    The remains of the bus outside Dallas.

    September 23, 2005
    Bus Carrying Elderly Storm Evacuees Explodes Near Dallas
    By LAURA GRIFFIN and VIKAS BAJAJ

    WILMER, Tex., Sept. 23 - A bus carrying elderly evacuees from an assisted living center in Houston was rocked by multiple explosions on its way to Dallas early this morning, killing at least 24 elderly residents.

    The bus was carrying 45 people - 38 residents, 6 staff members and the driver - from the Brighton Gardens assisted living center in Bellaire, a suburb southwest of Houston, when it caught fire on Interstate 45, the main highway connecting Dallas and Houston. The explosions occurred near Wilmer, a suburb about 15 miles from downtown Dallas.

    Witnesses and local officials said smoke, possibly from the brakes, had forced the driver to pull over to the side of the road before at least three explosions covered the bus in flames at about 7 a.m. Central time.

    Traffic behind the bus stopped immediately and was backed up 17 miles within 10 minutes and more than 20 miles shortly thereafter. People jumped out of their cars and tried to get into the bus, breaking through the windows, to get people out. At least a dozen people got out of the bus alive and were sent to Dallas-area hospitals. At least nine of them ranging in age from 78 to 101 were at Parkland Hospital with eight in fair condition, said Melissa Turner, a spokeswoman for the county-run hospital. (The condition of the ninth patient was unavailable this afternoon.)

    A Dallas County sheriff's official said residents' oxygen tanks appear to have contributed to the explosions and made it hard for rescue workers - which included a sheriff's deputy and emergency medical technicians - to get to people trapped in the bus. "The oxygen canisters ignited causing multiple explosions and making it too hot to get anyone else off at that point," said Don Peritz, a spokesman for the sheriff.

    The first sheriff's deputy to arrive on the scene struggled to guide people out of the bus. "The sheriff's deputy trying to get people off the bus used his flashlight, telling passengers to 'Follow the light' and some of them did but not all of them could," said John Wiley Price, a Dallas County commissioner, the county equivalent of a city council member in Texas.

    Harry Wilson, 78, was among the first to be rescued from the bus because he was the last one to get on the bus the day before, said his son, Jeffrey. The older Mr. Wilson is paralyzed on his left side from a stroke he suffered last year. He was taken to Parkland Hospital after the bus explosion.

    "I am happy my dad is O.K.," said the younger Mr. Wilson, who turned 47 today and had flown in from Tampa, Fla., planning to meet his father when the bus arrived. "He has dodged a lot of bullets in his life. He is more concerned right now about everybody else - his friends on board."

    Fred Witte, who owns a salvage yard about a block away from the place where the bus exploded, walked to the scene after seeing the smoke. "I looked down there and there was smoke coming up and then there was fire and I said 'Oh my god, that's a bus,' " he said. "I heard hollering, people saying 'Over here.' I looked down and there were about 15 or 20 old people. One lady was shaking real bad."

    Mr. Witte said emergency medical workers gave at least one woman oxygen and he helped get a blanket for an amputee with one leg.

    An official for Sunrise Senior Living, the Virginia-based company that owns Brighton Gardens, said none of the center's employees were among the dead. She said the assisted living center, which houses about 140 residents, had chartered at least two buses to take residents to the company's three assisted living centers in Dallas. The other bus arrived safely, said Sarah Evers, a spokeswoman for Sunrise. Some other residents had been evacuated by family members earlier in the week.

    "They were evacuating in advance of Hurricane Rita, which was predicted to affect the community," Ms. Evers said. "Resident safety was our primary concern. We are absolutely shocked and saddened by what happened."

    The bus left Brighton, part of which is also a nursing home, on Thursday at 3 p.m., taking 15 hours to cover a distance Texas residents drive frequently in under five hours during normal conditions. Ms. Evers said the facility's management decided to evacuate Tuesday night after being asked to do so by local fire officials who were concerned about flooding, which Bellaire has been susceptible to in past storms. But the bus did not leave until Thursday, after relatives had had a chance to retrieve their family members.

    Sunrise said it contracted with a Chicago-based bus service, the Bus Bank, to provide transportation for its residents. The company, whose officials did not immediately return phone calls, appear to have subcontracted the work to Global Limo Inc., a small bus firm based in Pharr, Tex., near the Mexican border.

    Employees who answered the phone at Global Limo declined to comment saying they had been advised by an attorney not to answer any questions. "We'll issue a public statement probably tomorrow," a woman who answered the phone said.

    Global Limo has six buses and 10 drivers, according to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, the agency that regulates buses. The company's safety record warranted a investigation in August, but it was unclear if one has been performed.

    The National Transportation Safety Board has sent investigators to Dallas to investigate the explosion.

    Health care facilities have to follow national guidelines on how they store and use oxygen, which is not flammable on its own but can feed a fire or allow other compounds to burn at a lower temperature, said Burton Klein, a health care fire, and electrical safety consultant based in Boston. Moreover, pressurized oxygen canisters can rupture in hot temperatures.

    "A whole host of things worked against them," Mr. Klein said. "It wasn't just the oxygen or the overheating of the brakes."

    Mr. Klein said there are federal regulations on shipping oxygen, but he does not know of any rules governing the use and storage of the gas on private buses. Commercial airlines and Amtrak restrict the use of oxygen canisters.

    A few hours after the explosions, the bus was a charred skeleton of itself and the stench of burning rubber was intense across six lanes of highway. Local officials quickly moved the bus to a county bus and truck depot nearby with the 24 bodies still onboard. The bodies were later removed and put into a refrigerated truck owned by the county medical examiner's office.

    Mr. Price, the county commissioner, said it could take "as much as three to four weeks to get the remains identified" because coroners would have to use dental and tissue records to identify the charred remains.

    At least two people on the bus had been previously evacuated from Sunrise facilities near New Orleans before Katrina made landfall, Mr. Price said. Ms. Evers, the Sunrise official, confirmed that some residents were brought to the Brighton facility from Louisiana but could not say how many of those people were on the bus. Traffic was trickling along to Dallas by 11 a.m. local time. Images of the flaming bus were broadcast on live local television and picked up on national cable news channels.

    In Bellaire and Houston, local officials defended the decision to encourage residents to evacuate.

    Mayor Cindy Siegel of Bellaire said the city remains worried about storm-related damage to power lines and the prospect of flooding. "Brighton Gardens was following their evacuation procedures," she said at a news conference. "If you recall 24 hours ago we expected to take the full brunt of Hurricane Rita. I think all of us recall that just in recent weeks events of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, Louisiana, and Alabama and Mississippi - that those people with special needs that weren't addressed and how many people lost their lives."

    More than 60 people died in nursing homes that were not evacuated when Hurricane Katrina hit Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama last month.

    Ms. Evers of Sunrise said the company evacuated its two facilities in the New Orleans area before Hurricane Katrina struck without incident. Based in McLean, Va., Sunrise operates about 420 facilities in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Germany.

    Mayor Bill White of Houston insisted that a mandatory evacuation order applied only to low-lying areas and not the city as a whole.

    As they did Thursday night, the mayor and other officials told people living in the "voluntary evacuation" area, which includes most of metropolitan Houston, to stay off the highways and at home - that it was too late to try to escape the storm and their safest bet was to hunker down at home.

    The elderly, especially those that need constant medical supervision are often at the greatest risk of death and serious injury during hurried evacuations, according to health experts. The average temperature in Dallas and Houston was 81 degrees this morning and has since climbed to 96 degrees.

    In addition to the people who died in the explosion, at least one other 82-year-old woman died of dehydration while stuck in traffic in the stifling heat near the town of Cleveland, a town about 45 miles northeast of Houston.

    Highways out of Houston have been clogged with more than two million people headed to Dallas, Austin, San Antonio and elsewhere.

    Laura Griffin reported from Wilmer and Vikas Bajaj reported from New York. Rick Lyman contributed reporting from Houston.

    Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections XML Help Contact Us Work for Us Site Map Back to Top

September 21, 2005








  •  







    Olivia Frances Whelan




    Olivia Frances Whelan Las Vegas, July, 2004



     







    Michael Patrick Whelan




    Michael Patrick Whelan Las Vegas, July, 2004



     






  •  




    An aerial view of the devastation caused by high winds and heavy flooding in the greater New Orleans area following Hurricane Katrina in Baton Rouge, Louisiana August 30, 2005. Floodwaters engulfed much of New Orleans on Tuesday as officials feared a steep death toll and planned to evacuate thousands remaining in shelters after the historic city's defenses were breached by Hurricane Katrina.

    REUTERS/Vincent Laforet/Pool

    September 18, 2005
    Close Encounter of the Human Kind
    By ABRAHAM VERGHESE, M.D.

    With the first busloads of Katrina refugees about to arrive in San Antonio, the call went out for physician volunteers, and I signed up for the 2 a.m. to 8 a.m. shift. On the way, riding down dark, deserted streets, I thought of driving in for night shifts in the I.C.U. as an intern many years ago, and how I would try to steel myself, as if putting on armor.

    Within a massive structure at Kelly U.S.A. (formerly Kelly Air Force Base), a brightly lighted processing area led to office cubicles, where after registering, new arrivals with medical needs came to see us. My first patient sat before me, haggard, pointing to what ailed her, as if speech no longer served her. I peeled her shoes from swollen feet, trying not to remove skin in the process. Cuts from submerged objects and immersion in standing water had caused the swelling, as well as infection of both feet. An antibiotic, a pair of slip-ons from the roomful of donated clothing and a night with her feet elevated - that would help.

    The ailments common among the refugees included diarrhea, bronchitis, sore throat and voices hoarse or lost. And stress beyond belief. People didn't have their medications, and blood sugars and blood pressures were out of control.

    I prayed, as I wrote prescriptions, that their memories of particular pills were accurate. For a man on methadone maintenance who was now cramping and sweating, I prescribed codeine to hold him. Another man, clutching a gym bag as if I might snatch it from him, admitted when I gently probed that he was hearing voices again. We sat together looking through the Physicians' Desk Reference. "That's it," he said, recognizing the pill he hadn't taken since the storm hit.

    Hesitantly, I asked each patient, "Where did you spend the last five days?" I wanted to reconcile the person in front of me with the terrible locales on television. But as the night wore on, I understood that they needed me to ask; to not ask was to not honor their ordeal. Hard men wiped at their eyes and became animated in the telling. The first woman, the one who seemed mute from stress, began a recitation in a courtroom voice, as if preparing for future testimony.

    It reminded me of my previous work in field clinics in India and Ethiopia, where, with so few medical resources at hand, the careful listening, the thorough exam, the laying of hands was the therapy. And I felt the same helplessness, knowing that the illness here was inextricably linked to the bigger problem of homelessness, disenfranchisement and despair.

    Near the end of my shift, a new group of patients arrived. A man in his 70's with gray hair and beard came in looking fit and vigorous. One eye was milky white and sightless, but the glint in his good eye was enough for two. His worldly belongings were in a garbage bag, but his manner was dignified.

    He was out of medicine, and his blood sugar and blood pressure were high. He couldn't pay for his medication, so his doctor always gave him samples: "Whatever he have. Whatever he have." He had kept his shoes on for five days, he said, removing the battered, pickled but elegant pair, a cross between bowling shoes and dancing shoes. His toes were carved ebony, the tendons on the back like cables, the joints gnarled but sturdy. All night I had seen many feet; in his bare feet I read resilience.

    He told me that for two nights after the floods, he had perched on a ledge so narrow that his legs dangled in the water. At one point, he said, he saw Air Force One fly over, and his hopes soared. "I waited, I waited," he said, but no help came. Finally a boat got him to a packed bridge. There, again, he waited. He shook his head in disbelief, smiling though. "Doc, they treat refugees in other countries better than they treated us."

    "I'm so sorry," I said. "So sorry."

    He looked at me long and hard, cocking his head as if weighing my words, which sounded so weak, so inadequate. He rose, holding out his hand, his posture firm as he shouldered his garbage bag. "Thank you, Doc. I needed to hear that. All they got to say is sorry. All they got to say is sorry."

    I was still troubled by him when I left, even though he seemed the hardiest of all. This encounter between two Americans, between doctor and patient, had been carried to all the fullness that was permitted, and yet it was incomplete, as if he had, as a result of this experience, set in place some new barriers that neither I nor anyone else would ever cross.

    Driving home, I remembered my own metaphor of strapping on armor for the night shift. The years have shown that there is no armor. There never was. The willingness to be wounded may be all we have to offer.

    Abraham Verghese, M.D., is the Joaquin Cigarroa Jr. Chair and Marvin Forland Distinguished Professor at the University of Texas Health Sciences Center, San Antonio.

    Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections XML Help Contact Us Work for Us Site Map Back to Top



  • Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
    Maureen Dowd.

    September 21, 2005
    Message: I Can't
    By MAUREEN DOWD
    WASHINGTON

    The president won't be happy until he dons a yellow slicker and actually takes the place of Anderson Cooper, violently blown about by Rita as he talks into a camera lens lashed with water, hanging onto a mailbox as he's hit by a flying pig in a squall, sucked up by a waterspout in the eye of the storm over the Dry Tortugas.

    Then maybe he'll go back to the White House and do his job instead of running down to the Gulf Coast for silly disaster-ops every other day.

    There's nothing more pathetic than watching someone who's out of touch feign being in touch. On his fifth sodden pilgrimage of penitence to the devastation he took so long to comprehend, W. desperately tried to show concern. He said he had spent some "quality time" at a Chevron plant in Pascagoula and nattered about trash removal, infrastructure assessment teams and the "can-do spirit."

    "We look forward to hearing your vision so we can more better do our job," he said at a briefing in Gulfport, Miss., urging local officials to "think bold," while they still need to think mold.

    Mr. Bush should stop posing in shirtsleeves and get back to the Oval Office. He has more hacks and cronies he's trying to put into important jobs, and he needs to ride herd on that.

    The announcement that a veterinarian, Norris Alderson, who has no experience on women's health issues, would head the F.D.A.'s Office of Women's Health ran into so much flak from appalled women that the F.D.A. may have already reneged on it. No morning-after pill, thanks to the antediluvian administration, but there may be hope for a morning-after horse pill.

    Mr. Bush made a frownie over Brownie, but didn't learn much. He's once more trying to appoint a nothingburger to a position of real consequence in homeland security. The choice of Julie Myers, a 36-year-old lawyer with virtually no immigration, customs or law enforcement experience, to head the roiling Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency with its $4 billion budget and 22,000 staffers, has caused some alarm, according to The Washington Post.

    Ms. Myers's main credentials seem to be that she worked briefly for the semidisgraced homeland security director, Michael Chertoff, when he was at the Justice Department. She just married Mr. Chertoff's chief of staff, John Wood, and she's the niece of Gen. Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

    As a former associate for Ken Starr, the young woman does have impeachment experience, in case the forensic war on terrorism requires the analysis of stains on dresses.

    Julie makes Brownie look like Giuliani. I'll sleep better tonight, knowing that when she gets back from her honeymoon, Julie will be patrolling the frontier.

    As if the Veterinarian and the Niece were not bad enough, there was also the Accused. David Safavian, the White House procurement official involved in Katrina relief efforts, was arrested on Monday, accused by the F.B.I. of lying and obstructing a criminal investigation into the seamy case of "Casino Jack" Abramoff, the Republican operative who has broken new ground in giving lobbying a bad name. Democrats say the fact that Mr. Safavian's wife is a top lawyer for the Republican congressman who's leading the whitewash of the White House blundering on Katrina does not give them confidence.

    Just as he has stonewalled other inquiries, Mr. Bush is trying to paper over his Katrina mistakes by appointing his homeland security adviser, Frances Townsend, to investigate how the feds fumbled the response.

    Mr. Bush's "Who's Your Daddy?" bravura - blowing off the world on global warming and the allies on the Iraq invasion - has been slapped back by Mother Nature, which refuses to be fooled by spin.

    When Donald Rumsfeld came out yesterday to castigate the gloom-and-doomers and talk about the inroads American forces had made against terrorists in Afghanistan and Iraq, he could not so easily recast reality.

    In Afghanistan, the U.S.'s handpicked puppet president is still battling warlords and a revivified Taliban, and the export of poppies for the heroin trade is once more thriving.

    Iraq is worse, with more than 1,900 American troops killed. Five more died yesterday, as well as four security men connected to the U.S. embassy office in Mosul, all to fashion a theocratic-leaning regime aligned with Iran. In Basra, two journalists who have done work for The Times have been killed in the last two months.

    The more the president echoes his dad's "Message: I care," the more the world hears "Message: I can't."

    Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections XML Help Contact Us Work for Us Site Map Back to Top

September 20, 2005

  •  







    Almost Before We Spoke, We Swore




    Tim Bower


    William Shakespeare, in keeping with traditions of Elizabethan drama, peppered his plays with profanity and celebrated the vulgar as well as the sublime


     



    Tim Bower

    Geoffrey Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales" were unabashedly bawdy and profane. That may be why students can still be persuaded to read them.


     


    September 20, 2005
    Almost Before We Spoke, We Swore
    By NATALIE ANGIER

    Incensed by what it sees as a virtual pandemic of verbal vulgarity issuing from the diverse likes of Howard Stern, Bono of U2 and Robert Novak, the United States Senate is poised to consider a bill that would sharply increase the penalty for obscenity on the air.

    By raising the fines that would be levied against offending broadcasters some fifteenfold, to a fee of about $500,000 per crudity broadcast, and by threatening to revoke the licenses of repeat polluters, the Senate seeks to return to the public square the gentler tenor of yesteryear, when seldom were heard any scurrilous words, and famous guys were not foul mouthed all day.

    Yet researchers who study the evolution of language and the psychology of swearing say that they have no idea what mystic model of linguistic gentility the critics might have in mind. Cursing, they say, is a human universal. Every language, dialect or patois ever studied, living or dead, spoken by millions or by a small tribe, turns out to have its share of forbidden speech, some variant on comedian George Carlin's famous list of the seven dirty words that are not supposed to be uttered on radio or television.

    Young children will memorize the illicit inventory long before they can grasp its sense, said John McWhorter, a scholar of linguistics at the Manhattan Institute and the author of "The Power of Babel," and literary giants have always constructed their art on its spine.

    "The Jacobean dramatist Ben Jonson peppered his plays with fackings and "peremptorie Asses," and Shakespeare could hardly quill a stanza without inserting profanities of the day like "zounds" or "sblood" - offensive contractions of "God's wounds" and "God's blood" - or some wondrous sexual pun.

    The title "Much Ado About Nothing," Dr. McWhorter said, is a word play on "Much Ado About an O Thing," the O thing being a reference to female genitalia.

    Even the quintessential Good Book abounds in naughty passages like the men in II Kings 18:27 who, as the comparatively tame King James translation puts it, "eat their own dung, and drink their own piss."

    In fact, said Guy Deutscher, a linguist at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands and the author of "The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind's Greatest Invention," the earliest writings, which date from 5,000 years ago, include their share of off-color descriptions of the human form and its ever-colorful functions. And the written record is merely a reflection of an oral tradition that Dr. Deutscher and many other psychologists and evolutionary linguists suspect dates from the rise of the human larynx, if not before.

    Some researchers are so impressed by the depth and power of strong language that they are using it as a peephole into the architecture of the brain, as a means of probing the tangled, cryptic bonds between the newer, "higher" regions of the brain in charge of intellect, reason and planning, and the older, more "bestial" neural neighborhoods that give birth to our emotions.

    Researchers point out that cursing is often an amalgam of raw, spontaneous feeling and targeted, gimlet-eyed cunning. When one person curses at another, they say, the curser rarely spews obscenities and insults at random, but rather will assess the object of his wrath, and adjust the content of the "uncontrollable" outburst accordingly.

    Because cursing calls on the thinking and feeling pathways of the brain in roughly equal measure and with handily assessable fervor, scientists say that by studying the neural circuitry behind it they are gaining new insights into how the different domains of the brain communicate - and all for the sake of a well-venomed retort.

    Other investigators have examined the physiology of cursing, how our senses and reflexes react to the sound or sight of an obscene word. They have determined that hearing a curse elicits a literal rise out of people. When electrodermal wires are placed on people's arms and fingertips to study their skin conductance patterns and the subjects then hear a few obscenities spoken clearly and firmly, participants show signs of instant arousal.

    Their skin conductance patterns spike, the hairs on their arms rise, their pulse quickens, and their breathing becomes shallow.

    Interestingly, said Kate Burridge, a professor of linguistics at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, a similar reaction occurs among university students and others who pride themselves on being educated when they listen to bad grammar or slang expressions that they regard as irritating, illiterate or déclassé.

    "People can feel very passionate about language," she said, "as though it were a cherished artifact that must be protected at all cost against the depravities of barbarians and lexical aliens."

    Dr. Burridge and a colleague at Monash, Keith Allan, are the authors of "Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language," which will be published early next year by the Cambridge University Press.

    Researchers have also found that obscenities can get under one's goosebumped skin and then refuse to budge. In one study, scientists started with the familiar Stroop test, in which subjects are flashed a series of words written in different colors and are asked to react by calling out the colors of the words rather than the words themselves.

    If the subjects see the word "chair" written in yellow letters, they are supposed to say "yellow."

    The researchers then inserted a number of obscenities and vulgarities in the standard lineup. Charting participants' immediate and delayed responses, the researchers found that, first of all, people needed significantly more time to trill out the colors of the curse words than they did for neutral terms like chair.

    The experience of seeing titillating text obviously distracted the participants from the color-coding task at hand. Yet those risqué interpolations left their mark. In subsequent memory quizzes, not only were participants much better at recalling the naughty words than they were the neutrals, but that superior recall also applied to the tints of the tainted words, as well as to their sense.

    Yes, it is tough to toil in the shadow of trash. When researchers in another study asked participants to quickly scan lists of words that included obscenities and then to recall as many of the words as possible, the subjects were, once again, best at rehashing the curses - and worst at summoning up whatever unobjectionable entries happened to precede or follow the bad bits.

    Yet as much as bad language can deliver a jolt, it can help wash away stress and anger. In some settings, the free flow of foul language may signal not hostility or social pathology, but harmony and tranquillity.

    "Studies show that if you're with a group of close friends, the more relaxed you are, the more you swear," Dr. Burridge said. "It's a way of saying: 'I'm so comfortable here I can let off steam. I can say whatever I like.' "

    Evidence also suggests that cursing can be an effective means of venting aggression and thereby forestalling physical violence.

    With the help of a small army of students and volunteers, Timothy B. Jay, a professor of psychology at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts in North Adams and the author of "Cursing in America" and "Why We Curse," has explored the dynamics of cursing in great detail.

    The investigators have found, among other things, that men generally curse more than women, unless said women are in a sorority, and that university provosts swear more than librarians or the staff members of the university day care center.

    Regardless of who is cursing or what the provocation may be, Dr. Jay said, the rationale for the eruption is often the same.

    "Time and again, people have told me that cursing is a coping mechanism for them, a way of reducing stress," he said in a telephone interview. "It's a form of anger management that is often underappreciated."

    Indeed, chimpanzees engage in what appears to be a kind of cursing match as a means of venting aggression and avoiding a potentially dangerous physical clash.

    Frans de Waal, a professor of primate behavior at Emory University in Atlanta, said that when chimpanzees were angry "they will grunt or spit or make an abrupt, upsweeping gesture that, if a human were to do it, you'd recognize it as aggressive."

    Such behaviors are threat gestures, Professor de Waal said, and they are all a good sign.

    "A chimpanzee who is really gearing up for a fight doesn't waste time with gestures, but just goes ahead and attacks," he added.

    By the same token, he said, nothing is more deadly than a person who is too enraged for expletives - who cleanly and quietly picks up a gun and starts shooting.

    Researchers have also examined how words attain the status of forbidden speech and how the evolution of coarse language affects the smoother sheets of civil discourse stacked above it. They have found that what counts as taboo language in a given culture is often a mirror into that culture's fears and fixations.

    "In some cultures, swear words are drawn mainly from sex and bodily functions, whereas in others, they're drawn mainly from the domain of religion," Dr. Deutscher said.

    In societies where the purity and honor of women is of paramount importance, he said, "it's not surprising that many swear words are variations on the 'son of a whore' theme or refer graphically to the genitalia of the person's mother or sisters."

    The very concept of a swear word or an oath originates from the profound importance that ancient cultures placed on swearing by the name of a god or gods. In ancient Babylon, swearing by the name of a god was meant to give absolute certainty against lying, Dr. Deutscher said, "and people believed that swearing falsely by a god would bring the terrible wrath of that god upon them." A warning against any abuse of the sacred oath is reflected in the biblical commandment that one must not "take the Lord's name in vain," and even today courtroom witnesses swear on the Bible that they are telling the whole truth and nothing but.

    Among Christians, the stricture against taking the Lord's name in vain extended to casual allusions to God's son or the son's corporeal sufferings - no mention of the blood or the wounds or the body, and that goes for clever contractions, too. Nowadays, the phrase, "Oh, golly!" may be considered almost comically wholesome, but it was not always so. "Golly" is a compaction of "God's body" and, thus, was once a profanity.

    Yet neither biblical commandment nor the most zealous Victorian censor can elide from the human mind its hand-wringing over the unruly human body, its chronic, embarrassing demands and its sad decay. Discomfort over body functions never sleeps, Dr. Burridge said, and the need for an ever-fresh selection of euphemisms about dirty subjects has long served as an impressive engine of linguistic invention.

    Once a word becomes too closely associated with a specific body function, she said, once it becomes too evocative of what should not be evoked, it starts to enter the realm of the taboo and must be replaced by a new, gauzier euphemism.

    For example, the word "toilet" stems from the French word for "little towel" and was originally a pleasantly indirect way of referring to the place where the chamber pot or its equivalent resides. But toilet has since come to mean the porcelain fixture itself, and so sounds too blunt to use in polite company. Instead, you ask your tuxedoed waiter for directions to the ladies' room or the restroom or, if you must, the bathroom.

    Similarly, the word "coffin" originally meant an ordinary box, but once it became associated with death, that was it for a "shoe coffin" or "thinking outside the coffin." The taboo sense of a word, Dr. Burridge said, "always drives out any other senses it might have had."

    Scientists have lately sought to map the neural topography of forbidden speech by studying Tourette's patients who suffer from coprolalia, the pathological and uncontrollable urge to curse. Tourette's syndrome is a neurological disorder of unknown origin characterized predominantly by chronic motor and vocal tics, a constant grimacing or pushing of one's glasses up the bridge of one's nose or emitting a stream of small yips or grunts.

    Just a small percentage of Tourette's patients have coprolalia - estimates range from 8 to 30 percent - and patient advocates are dismayed by popular portrayals of Tourette's as a humorous and invariably scatological condition. But for those who do have coprolalia, said Dr. Carlos Singer, director of the division of movement disorders at the University of Miami School of Medicine, the symptom is often the most devastating and humiliating aspect of their condition.

    Not only can it be shocking to people to hear a loud volley of expletives erupt for no apparent reason, sometimes from the mouth of a child or young teenager, but the curses can also be provocative and personal, florid slurs against the race, sexual identity or body size of a passer-by, for example, or deliberate and repeated lewd references to an old lover's name while in the arms of a current partner or spouse.

    Reporting in The Archives of General Psychiatry, Dr. David A. Silbersweig, a director of neuropsychiatry and neuroimaging at the Weill Medical College of Cornell University, and his colleagues described their use of PET scans to measure cerebral blood flow and identify which regions of the brain are galvanized in Tourette's patients during episodes of tics and coprolalia.

    They found strong activation of the basal ganglia, a quartet of neuron clusters deep in the forebrain at roughly the level of the mid-forehead, that are known to help coordinate body movement along with activation of crucial regions of the left rear forebrain that participate in comprehending and generating speech, most notably Broca's area.

    The researchers also saw arousal of neural circuits that interact with the limbic system, the wishbone-shape throne of human emotions, and, significantly, of the "executive" realms of the brain, where decisions to act or desist from acting may be carried out: the neural source, scientists said, of whatever conscience, civility or free will humans can claim.

    That the brain's executive overseer is ablaze in an outburst of coprolalia, Dr. Silbersweig said, demonstrates how complex an act the urge to speak the unspeakable may be, and not only in the case of Tourette's. The person is gripped by a desire to curse, to voice something wildly inappropriate. Higher-order linguistic circuits are tapped, to contrive the content of the curse. The brain's impulse control center struggles to short-circuit the collusion between limbic system urge and neocortical craft, and it may succeed for a time.

    Yet the urge mounts, until at last the speech pathways fire, the verboten is spoken, and archaic and refined brains alike must shoulder the blame.

    Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections XML Help Contact Us Work for Us Site Map Back to Top

  • Greed, It Turns Out, Isn't So Good




    Seth Wenig/Reuters

    Dennis Kozlowski leaving State Supreme Court in New York City in June.

    September 20, 2005
    Greed, It Turns Out, Isn't So Good
    By CLYDE HABERMAN

    MANY years ago, when we both toiled for The New York Post, a colleague passed the time one night telling me about corruption trials that he had covered in New Jersey, a state graced with an ample supply of government officials caught with their hands in the till.

    One case involved a mook who was charged with pocketing $100,000 in public funds. The prosecution had this fellow nailed. They could have measured him for a striped suit right there in the courtroom. In the end, his lawyer played the only card he had left.

    He paced theatrically in front of the jurors. Then he raised his hands beseechingly and said in his best "they arrested my guy for this?" tone: "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury - I mean, we're talking about $100,000."

    Nice try. Too bad for his client that it didn't work.

    A faintly reminiscent scene was played yesterday in a Manhattan courtroom. There, the Tyco tycoons L. Dennis Kozlowski and Mark H. Swartz were handcuffed and led away to begin long prison terms for having robbed their company, if not blind, then certainly nearsighted.

    To earn their sentences of 8 1/3 to 25 years, Messrs. Kozlowski and Swartz stole, by the prosecution's count, a cool $180 million and ultimately cost Tyco shareholders billions in the resulting scandal. "Kleptocratic management" was how an assistant district attorney, Owen E. Heimer, described their style.

    That the two men would go to prison was never in doubt. The only question was for how long. In pleading yesterday for leniency, the defense team offered an echo of the "what's so terrible?" argument that did that New Jersey official no good long ago.

    "Tyco is not Enron," said Mr. Swartz's lawyer, Charles A. Stillman.

    In other words, unlike Enron and other paragons of corporate greed, Tyco International did not go bankrupt because of Mr. Kozlowski's much-joked-about excesses and sins against good taste. Remember his $6,000 shower curtain and $15,000 umbrella stand? How about the $2 million birthday party that he threw for his wife on Sardinia, complete with an ice sculpture of Michelangelo's "David" urinating vodka.

    Despite all that, the company's stock did not implode. Thousands upon thousands did not lose their jobs. No old man or woman, so far as anyone knows, was forced to go on a Purina diet.

    I mean, we're talking about $100,000 - updated with a lot of extra zeroes for the new century.

    The judge, Michael J. Obus, was not buying Mr. Stillman's reasoning.

    Oh, he suggested, perhaps Mr. Heimer went overboard in describing the defendants as barely below monstrous. But let's not be airheaded. Harm was done and trust was violated, he said. So he sent the two men to prison for a good long while, ordering them also to pay $134 million in restitution and $105 million in fines. Goodbye shower curtain and umbrella stand.

    If nothing else, Mr. Kozlowski and Mr. Swartz were guilty of monumentally bad timing.

    They learned too late that greed is out of fashion, ever more so now that Hurricane Katrina has violently exposed the fault lines of class in America. Sorry, Gordon Gekko, but for the moment at least, corporate plunderers are no more tolerated than common criminals. Indeed, their reputations may be worse.

    "What gunman in the street," Mr. Heimer asked the judge, "has ever managed to steal $180 million?"

    Speaking of street gunmen, the punctuation-challenged rapper named Lil' Kim began a yearlong jail sentence yesterday. She had committed perjury in testifying about a 2001 shootout between rival hip-hop groups outside a Manhattan radio station. In the land of rap, settling differences with lead qualifies as intelligent discourse.

    Still, that world has more in common with the corporate realm than one might think. A unifying thread is greed: getting as much as you can while you can. One group can't talk enough about bling. The other has stock options.

    But who knows? Prison did Martha Stewart no harm; she is bigger than ever. Maybe Lil' Kim will prosper, too. And while not quite in their league when it comes to celebrity, Mr. Kozlowski might also figure out how to bounce back.

    That, however, lies well in his future. He has more immediate concerns. For one thing, Attica or wherever else he winds up may not be the best place for jokes about shower curtains.

    Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections XML Help Contact Us Work for Us Site Map Back to Top